In days gone by, people were not so much frightened of science, as oblivious to it. Sages such as CP Snow may well have flagged the importance of bridging the divide between the culture of the white coat with that of the pen or easel, but science then was the stuff of ivory towers - an eccentric, vocational past-time in which those bow-tied, balding, sock-and-sandal-wearing stereotypes would indulge. At most, the consumer might have paid lip service to science in terms of the monochrome TV male, and, of course, it was always male, as he endorsed washing powder or pet food, to prove a special selling point "scientifically", although I've often wondered how you might prove something unscientifically.

Science offers a way of finding out about, and changing, the world around you. As such, it is increasingly central to all our lives. It touches everything that we hold dear, from communication, to nutrition, to reproduction - and now promises to take us into a strange world of cyberspace, biotechnology and nanoscience.

The pride and scorn for science, that saw most people through the 20th-century, is now giving way to fear. Why the change? Jargon and methodology, more than ever, are raising the wall between the cognoscenti and Everyone Else. After all, it is a truism that we fear that which we don't understand, and nothing obfuscates quite as easily as a scientist stacking up one unknown word upon another. If faced with compound strings of incompre-hensible polysyllabic words interlaced with deceptively simple, yet meaningless terms, such as 'controls', 'standard deviation' and 'p values', is it any wonder that even the most hardened media hack, let alone the public, will run for the cover of the romance of a bygone era?

Which brings us to the second reason for fear. Not so much science itself, more those that do it: the dysfunctional nerds themselves. The scientist is usually a remote figure, as far as the public is concerned - more alien than a journalist or politician - therefore he (again) is hard to understand, and if we don't understand him, and even the occasional her, then clearly they must be bent on some form of world domination. The caricature scientific anorak has no feelings, no emotions, works long hours and is obsessed with his eccentric pursuits to the exclusion of all social and ethical considerations.

A third, and more substantive reason for fear, is the implication of the work that is actually being done. From the happy confidence of the 1950s and 60s TV ads, we have been plunged into brain-scrambling mobile phones, brain-gnawing prion diseases, contaminated foodstuffs, not to mention the underlying stealth of chemical and cyber-terrorism, let alone designer children, artificial wombs and human clones. Small wonder there is a simple knee-jerk to veto all this confusion and scary technology in one go. How can Joe Public, after a hard day at work, come home and be expected to tease out the pros and cons, weigh up the risks, consider all the implications, and differentiate the "yuck" from the reality. Wouldn't it be much easier to sit back in a past where everyone was 100% human, with their human values and understanding: the post comes three times a day, there are no mobiles, emails, or videos, perhaps no planes - and, of course, no freedom from toothache, infections and early death.

A sepia-tinged Arcadia where human beings lived out a Rousellian 'natural' existence, of course never happened, and such a prospect, or retrospect, should never be used as an antidote to science. Science, or the spirit of scientific inquiry, has always been with us and, indeed, the technologies that we are now considering were actually spawned by the brilliant concepts, such as quantum theory, propounded in the first half of the 20th-century.

Surely, the only way to quell a fear of science, is not to stop doing it: after all, science is about being curious and curiosity is about being human. Rather, we need to empower ourselves with knowledge so we can evaluate the alarms and the excitements in equal measure. The methodology and jargon can be circumvented, so long as the media, the general public, and scientists, all strive to talk to each other. As for the scientist-as-person, it would be an advance if we didn't evoke sneers and hasty retreats at parties. The more scientists can be seen as ordinary people, doing their job, the better, and this will only come as more people embrace it as a profession, especially women.

The only way to evaluate the implications of science is, of course, to be scientifically literate, and one can only be scientifically literate if one is willing to have an open mind and stop expecting our scientists alone to be the conscience of the nation. Imagine a society where to talk about science was as natural as talking about football; where, although one wasn't a scientific David Beckham, one was an armchair amateur up to speed with the latest breakthroughs and even performing virtual experiments on the net.

Once we have a society where science is as exciting as football, and where attending a science lecture or debate is as relevant and fun as going to the cinema, only then will we be truly empowered as a society to harness science for what we want in life, rather than the other way round.

Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE, director of the Royal Institution, is a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University